Is there an Issue with NVMe drives ?

Hi
I ran a hyper-v vm this morning and I tried to add a physical drive which I do regularly as I need to access the data on it.
Up until today, that data has always been on an SSD but I recently moved all that data onto a new NVMe drive.

The first time I tried, I added it while the VM was running and that blue screened the VM. when I tried to run that VM again it was trashed.
I had a backup so tried adding the drive before starting the VM. This did seem to work but I could not see the drive in explorer.
I could see it in disk management though. I tried a few times but none would give me access to the NVMe drive and I had one more crash.
I'm adding the drive as a SCSI drive as that's the only option.
Has anyone ever encountered this?

Thanks

Mike

mpooley said:

Hi
I ran a hyper-v vm this morning and I tried to add a physical drive which I do regularly as I need to access the data on it.
Up until today, that data has always been on an SSD but I recently moved all that data onto a new NVMe drive.

The first time I tried, I added it while the VM was running and that blue screened the VM. when I tried to run that VM again it was trashed.
I had a backup so tried adding the drive before starting the VM. This did seem to work but I could not see the drive in explorer.
I could see it in disk management though. I tried a few times but none would give me access to the NVMe drive and I had one more crash.
I'm adding the drive as a SCSI drive as that's the only option.
Has anyone ever encountered this?

Thanks

Mike

Hi there

I can't answer on HYPER-V VM's specifically -- however the general rule is with VM's (and there's no reason to think that HYPER-V is different in general) is that if you add PHYSICAL (or "RAW") devices to VM's then they need to be offline to Windows and the native file system / driver needs to be on the VM. You can of course still SHARE these devices with the HOST / other parts of your network with usual sharing mechanisms --e.g SAMBA, FTP, etc etc.

I often run Linux VM's with physically formatted XFS drives in a RAID (software RAID configuration) on the Linux VM -- Windows knows nothing about that file system but the Linux system picks it up perfectly.

Running VM's with Windows formatted drives as "RAW / Physical drives" should also work -- you need to add the whole device just not a partition --and if you are using Logical drives -- ?? don't know --I never ever use logical drives / partitions any more -- if you have GPT you can have as many primary partitions as you want -- MBR HDD's etc limit number of primary partitions to 4.

Cheers
jimbo

I haven't tried in Hyper-V, but it works fine in Virtual Box. I have 2 PC's that have 2 NVMe drives in them as the only drives, and both run VM's without trouble.

Thanks all !
Yeah it is offline on the host.

<quote>

I haven't tried in Hyper-V, but it works fine in Virtual Box. I have 2 PC's that have 2 NVMe drives in them as the only drives, and both run VM's without trouble.
>

It's not that I can't run the VM. That works fine I just cant add it as a physical drive in the settings.

The driver issue is interesting but The VM is an image of the host from yesterday and yesterday I had the new drive in place and was testing it. so don't think it's a driver problem.

My Main C drive is NVMe as well (although a different manufacturer) so I would think the motherboard drivers would take care of that?

It's very strange as I have done this many times for test purposes and it's always worked well. The only difference is the drive itself.
when you add the drive it's a "SCSI" drive you are adding in settings isn't it, so is an NVMe drive on the SCSI bus ?
I know it's on the PCI bus but ... ...
it's the only thing I can think of.

Thanks

Mike

Thanks Kari
I will do that as a workaround but as you say, it will be slow.
I would love to know why this doesn't work though.
It's got me puzzled.

Kari said:

@mpooley, this is in no way a solution to your issue, but at least it could be used as a workaround until you can fix the issue:

In Hyper-V Manager, run New Hard Disk Wizard. Select a dynamically expanding VHDX, then in Configure Disk page, select your NVMe disk:



This will create a VHDX file, copying all content from NVMe disk to VHDX. You can then add this VHDX to any virtual machine as secondary disk.

Only con I know is that the process of making a VHDX from a physical disk can be will be quite slow.

Kari

Hi there

@mpooley

If these are VHDX drives then that I think is rather going against what I imagine the user was wanting -- For these to be connected as PHYSICAL drives and therefore using the Native file system of the OS which improves over the paravirtualised I/O system.

It's easy enough in VMWARE -- just add as physical drives -- ignore the "partition error" message -- the device will be added.

Otherwise in all the VM systems I've used you can install specific drivers at the Windows install time :

When installing the VM -- assuming it's a Windows VM in this case -- is to at install time - if no HDD's are shown then there's an option "Load drivers" on the install menu (Windows install menu --not the VM) so if the drives need drivers then point to the installation media for the drivers -- you should initially have this as an iso (or whatever) image for the VM.

Cheers
jimbo

Thanks I checked and all the drivers are there and up to date .

Hi there

@mpooley

are these genuinely separate drives to the drive your OS is installed on --also are they "Logical" or "Real primary partitions"

You can't add any drive to a VM as a physical "RAW" device if it's not a totally separate device unused by the Host OS.

Please people stay safe too -- there's all sorts of B/S around about what to do these days -- just take care whatever -- we all want to be around again when this whole hideous nonsense has passed (as it will eventually).

Cheers
jimbo